Wilson, Cribb, Trefalt, and Aszkielowicz's "Japanese War Criminals"

Sandra Wilson is professor of history in the School of Arts and a fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University. She is the author of The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931-33 (2002).

Robert Cribb is professor of Asian history at the Australian National University. He is author (with Li Narangoa) of the Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia: Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia (Columbia, 2014).

Beatrice Trefalt is senior lecturer in Japanese studies at Monash University. She is the author of Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975 (2003), and coeditor, with Chris Dixon and Sean Brawley, of Competing Voices from the Pacific War (2009).

Dean Aszkielowicz teaches at Murdoch University and is the author of The Australian Pursuit of Japanese War Criminals, 1943-1958: From Foe to Friend.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their 2017 book, Japanese War Criminals: The Politics of Justice After the Second World War, and reported the following:

Our book is about the pursuit of Japanese war crimes suspects by eleven Allied governments after the Second World War, in one international tribunal (the Tokyo Trial) and many more nationally-based military tribunals. About 5,700 suspects were prosecuted in total. Our main focus is on the complex interconnections between considerations of justice and of politics, broadly defined, in the war crimes trial project. Page 99 comes nearly at the end of our chapter on what happened in the courtrooms.

The courtroom story is only one part of the whole account. In fact one of our major points is that it’s not enough to look only at courts and sentences. Politics and justice were intertwined at all stages of the pursuit of the war criminals, from the initial investigations through selection of defendants, prosecutions, sentencing, and imprisonment or execution, to eventual release. But even though page 99 only deals with one part of the process, it illuminates several of the main themes in the book as a whole.

At the top of the page we mention Korean camp guards, which draws attention to the fact that, as colonial subjects, Koreans served in the Japanese military and could be arrested as “Japanese” war crimes suspects. Most of the page is about alterations to sentences that had been passed in the courtrooms. Sentences were altered in a variety of ways, sometimes immediately and sometimes long afterwards. Recognising that alterations happened highlights the danger of looking only at initial sentences: they do not necessarily represent what happened to the defendant in the end. Some sentences were altered because a confirming officer was unhappy with the proceedings or because the sentence was out of step with sentences passed on other defendants in similar cases. Some sentences were changed for political reasons. Here we give an example in which Chinese authorities intervened to have a general found not guilty so that they could use him to recruit Japanese soldiers to help fight on the Nationalist side against Communist forces in the Chinese civil war. We have much more to say about more formal clemency processes later in the book.

Learn more about Japanese War Criminals at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Willinsky's "The Intellectual Properties of Learning"

John Willinsky is the Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and the director of the Public Knowledge Project.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke, and reported the following:

By page 99 of this book’s millennium-plus history of learning, I am dealing with Hildegard of Bingen at the beginning of the twelfth century, the last great age of learning within the monasteries. Hildegard is an abbess in the Rhineland, whose outstanding work in medicine remains a source of research and medication today, while her rich musical compositions are still part of the choral tradition. Hildegard is a heroic figure among monastics, even as she exemplifies learning’s loss, as the universities that began to emerge during that century excluded women.

The book focuses on how Hildegard and others laboring over manuscripts reflected a growing sense of intellectual rights and properties associated with such work. Within communal orders of monasteries, cathedral schools, and universities, the learned pursued their rights to access book chests and libraries, use this work in their writing, and attract the sponsorship needed to sustain their learning and ensure the autonomy it required. These works’ authorship was credited as a means of interpreting them.

In her own day and in her own way, Hildegard extended the intellectual property rights associated with learning by overcoming the monastic enclosure that had a particularly tight grip on nuns. She expanded access rights to learning by recording and sharing her medicinal remedies; by seeking permission to publish her migraine-inflected, visionary cosmology through magnificent illustrations; and by undertaking preaching tours to spread what she had learned to communities along the Rhine.

It would not be until the early eighteenth century – and the book’s final chapter – that the intellectual property rights associated with learned works and authors would first become encoded in the law. It took the passage, in Britain, of “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning,” otherwise known as the Statute of Anne 1710, which stands as the first modern intellectual property law. A point of consideration for page 99 in this book, as well as those pages before and after it, is how much of learning’s original contribution to the concept of intellectual property has been lost our own times.

Learn more about The Intellectual Properties of Learning at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Garbarino's "Miller's Children"

James Garbarino holds the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology and is Senior Faculty Fellow with the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University Chicago. He has served as an adviser to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, the National Institute for Mental Health, the American Medical Association, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the FBI. He is the author of Listening to Killers: Lessons Learned from My Twenty Years as a Psychological Expert Witness in Murder Cases and Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them.

Garbarino applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Miller's Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Miller’s Children I explore the role played by “therapy” in the eventual rehabilitation and transformation of juvenile murderers. Because most of them have traveled the path of experiencing “developmental trauma” as children and teenagers, they usually need more than just maturation to get better, to become good men. This is where therapy comes into the picture. For most it’s a haphazard process of taking advantage of whatever therapeutic resources are available to them. However, access itself is often a problem for them because as “lifers” they are often either excluded from programs as a matter of prison policy, or placed so far down the priority list that they rarely get to the top and thus earn the right to participate. In places where this is not the case it seems clear that access to therapy aids and supports whatever else these “Miller’s Children” are doing—studying, meditating, reading, receiving mentorship, reflection, taking programs of any kind (e.g. substance abuse prevention and anger management), and just using their now mature brains after they reach age 26 to make sense of themselves and the larger world. Every “lifer” has to choose between living as a savage barbarian (the life of violence, defiance, misbehavior, and rage) or as a monk (the life of contemplation, service, study, and peacefulness). Formal therapy can contribute to both making the “right” choice and learning how to live productively within the confines of that choice. That so many do so is a testament to the human spirit! Seeing in up close and personal in many of the men I have interviewed has been an uplifting and inspirational experience, one that I will always cherish.

Learn more about Miller's Children at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Listening to Killers.

My Book, The Movie: Miller's Children.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jerry Gershenhorn's "Louis Austin and the Carolina Times"

Jerry Gershenhorn is Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle, and reported the following:

Based in Durham, North Carolina, Louis Austin, the courageous editor and publisher of the black news weekly, The Carolina Times, fought against the oppression and segregation of African Americans from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. In my book, I argue that the civil rights struggle predated the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which in many narratives is considered the start of the movement. I also emphasize the critical role played by the black press in this long struggle. In North Carolina, Louis Austin published the most important black newspaper in the state from 1927 to 1971, using that paper to fight for racial justice. In doing so, he regularly attacked anyone who blocked African Americans’ path toward racial justice.

On page 99 of my book, I discuss Austin’s agitation for integration of higher education in North Carolina during the early 1950s. The background for this section was a successful 1951 NAACP lawsuit that compelled the desegregation of the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although white educational officials complied with the court decision and admitted several black students to the university’s law school, these same officials sought to restrict the number of black students entering UNC. One tactic employed by white officials was to create a doctoral program in education at a nearby public black college, North Carolina College at Durham (NCC), so that black students who sought a graduate degree in education, which was in great demand, would not apply to UNC. On page 99, I explain how black educators and black activists, including Austin, opposed the new doctoral program because its purpose was to perpetuate racial segregation: “Austin published a front-page editorial opposing the PhD program.... Moreover, Austin pointed out that NCC’s budget was too small to finance a PhD program, noting that NCC’s existing undergraduate programs were woefully underfunded.”

Despite black opposition, UNC officials used their power to force the black college to accept the new program. At that time black state colleges in North Carolina had majority-white trustee boards. I write, “At the July 1951 emergency meeting of the UNC Board of Trustees, NCC officials were told to ask its board of trustees to support a two-year request for $100,000 per year to enhance graduate study and to establish a PhD program in education.... The majority-white NCC board approved the PhD program by a vote of seven to two, with only the two black board members present at the meeting opposing the program.” The Carolina Times called the program a “fire-sale priced, segregated PhD program,” and added, “UNC and state education officials chuckled in their beards at their latest success in halting the movement of integrated education.” Nonetheless, Austin and other black activists continued to fight for the integration of public education, and, in 1955, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, NAACP and local Durham lawyers succeeded in forcing UNC to desegregate its undergraduate programs.

Learn more about Louis Austin and the Carolina Times at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew J. Huebner's "Love and Death in the Great War"

Andrew J. Huebner is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era.

Huebner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Love and Death in the Great War, and reported the following:

Love and Death in the Great War weaves together two overlapping stories: one reinterprets American public and official culture during the First World War, the other tracks the experiences of a small number of individual American participants and their families. I argue that the state and its allies sold the war as a defense of home, the white family, and traditional gender roles, a justification that shared space with (or actually served as an articulation of) the loftier political and ideological ambitions usually associated with Woodrow Wilson’s intervention. I then trace the purchase of such ideas among regular people, looking at how their experiences did or didn’t harmonize with the widespread story of a war fought for family. In neither of those realms, private experience nor public culture, I argue, did that story survive the war without disruption.

On page 99, I’m just getting into one of those disruptions. Borrowing from the historian Nancy Bristow and others, I write about the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), one of the agencies central to the First World War moral program. Just as the authors of prescriptive or patriotic literature were reassuring the public that doughboys would be paragons of masculine character, military officials were dealing with the reality that some of them weren’t. This was a key promise of wartime redemptive thinking—that military service stabilized rather than undermined male virtue, which for many arbiters of respectability meant sexual restraint. As soldiers had long done, American trainees sought out sex and alcohol, and home front families knew it and worried about it. So beginning with the CTCA, and from the training camps all the way to France, American leaders including Gen. John Pershing labored to safeguard the morality of the doughboy through wholesome diversion, prophylactic treatment, and the threat of punishment. Of course the brass wanted a robust force “fit to fight,” but the leadership also knew it would have a public relations disaster on its hands if the war story of moral doughboys broke down.

Learn more about Love and Death in the Great War at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shoba Narayan's "The Milk Lady of Bangalore"

Shoba Narayan is an award-winning author and columnist. Her books include Return to India: an immigrant memoir, Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes, and the newly released The Milk Lady of Bangalore: An Unexpected Adventure.

Narayan graduated from the Columbia Journalism School which awarded her a Pulitzer Fellowship; and is an alumnus of Mount Holyoke College and Women’s Christian College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Milk Lady of Bangalore and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is where I rant about the benefits of A2 milk. It is sort of symbolic because currently, I am trying to source and buy milk from “desi” or native Indian cows. These are humped cattle-- the Bos indicus species-- and their milk is supposed to be “non-diabetogenic” and good for milk allergies. This is also true of most native breeds such as the English Jersey cows.

There is a poignant statement in my book about how Indians should market indigenous cow milk like the French market cheese. We have at least 108 native Indian cow breeds. Farmers don’t like them because they produce less milk than the Holstein-Freisan breeds. But the native cows are hardier, and give healthier milk.

That said, the tone of the writing in page 99 is much more activist than the humorous tone of the rest of the work.

One thing that comes through loud and clear on this page is how I have fallen in love with cows: their limpid eyes, their gentle demeanor, their implicit generosity, their ambling gait-- what’s not to love?

Page 99 touches on the politics of milk. The cow in India has now become so political. The hardest part of the book was to chase the various political stories that are now epitomized by the cow, and finally decide to delete all of them and make the book apolitical and therefore, hopefully, timeless.

I grew up with cows roaming the streets in India. That said, a particular set of circumstances had to come together, almost as if the universe was conspiring to bring them to me, in order for this book to happen.

Visit Shoba Narayan's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Milk Lady of Bangalore.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Urban's "Brokering Servitude"

Andy Urban is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies and History departments at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century, and reported the following:

In Brokering Servitude, page 99 marks the start of chapter three, “Chinese Servants and the American Colonial Imagination: Domesticity and Opposition to Restriction, 1865–1882.” This chapter explores how Americans debated incorporating Chinese immigrants into the national economy as domestic workers, and how Chinese servants and cooks navigated the discriminatory and racialized labor markets they encountered.

White Americans accused male Chinese servants of transgressing the gendered boundaries that delineated men’s work from women’s work. Among both pro- and anti-Chinese factions, the ability to perform labor that was coded as feminine was seized upon as a racial feature that made Chinese immigrants distinct. As I argue, observers conveniently ignored how legal and extralegal controls on Chinese immigrants’ freedom of contract relegated them to stigmatized service jobs where labor shortages were regular. White moderates sought a compromise solution with anti-Chinese activists in which Chinese immigrants would be allowed into the country to work as servants – through newly imagined guestworker visas – and removed when no longer needed.

In relationship to my book as a whole, chapter three is anchored by a question that is present throughout the manuscript: how did migration policies get debated, forged, and implemented with a mind to expanding or limiting the domestic labor supply, and what attitudes about race, citizenship, and gender informed these actions?

In terms of specifics, page 99 includes a close reading of a political cartoon, “The Servant Question” (available online here), which appeared in the San Francisco-based humor magazine The Wasp after the 1882 Chinese Restriction Act was passed. I write:

“The Servant Question” assigned a familiar Irish cast to the problem of obstreperous white servants, and implied that with Chinese immigration restricted, the difficulties that these laborers posed would only grow. The broad faces and pug noses borne by the job applicants mark them as Irish in contrast to the aquiline facial features of the woman evaluating them for hire. The text in the lower left-hand corner of the cartoon, which is presented in a solecistic written version of the Irish dialect, is titled “The Shorter Catechism,” an allusion to Irish immigrants’ Catholicism. Rather than respectfully submitting their qualifications, the applicants initiate a ruthless interrogation designed to vet the household’s personal, political, and economic standing. Nothing is off-limits.

The Irish servants’ “catechism” provides a glimpse at the fault lines separating household laborers from employers. One inquiry posed to the prospective employer by the fictional gang of Irish servants who have gathered in her kitchen is whether she would “mind givin me sisther’s pig a run in the gairden of a Sunday afternoon?” Middle-class publications frequently reported the outlandish requests that Irish servants allegedly made, and jokes of this nature became a staple feature of late-nineteenth-century American humor.

In the “Servant Question,” cartoonist Frederick Keller shows a racially-caricatured Chinese servant hovering in the background, with the text, “No questions asked.” Unlike the Irish servants to whom he is compared, there is no incessant interrogation of the employer. As is the case today, the demands of household consumers could temper anti-immigrant rhetoric – albeit not always for noble reasons.

Visit Andy Urban's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Bass's "One Goal"

A professor of history in New York, Amy Bass lived in Lewiston, Maine for four years as a student at Bates College. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Salon, and CNN Opinion, and her work for NBC’s Olympics coverage earned her an Emmy in 2012 for Outstanding Live Event Turnaround.

Bass applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together, and reported the following:

Page 99 in One Goal is toward the end of Chapter 6, Grind Mode, which focuses on how the Lewiston Blue Devils soccer team transitioned from being defeated in heartbreaking fashion in 2014 to a mindset that was ready to get ready to win in 2015. At a team meeting before summer and pre-season games get started, Coach McGraw tells his players that among all of the elements they need to take care of, (and there are plenty) academic eligibility is key. On page 99, we meet Jason Fuller, the Athletic Director of Lewiston High School, the man whose job it is to make sure student-athletes are exactly that: students and athletes.

As athletic directors go, Fuller looks like he stepped right out of central casting, sitting in a windowless office just off the gymnasium, cases of trophies lining the wall opposite his door. A burly guy with biceps that appear as though they might pop out of his polo shirt, he speaks in a booming, rapid-fire voice, rarely able to keep still, his close-cropped hair giving him an almost military appearance. He is, he admits, a tense guy and a straight shooter; someone who not only plays by the book but also wants to make sure the book is written correctly.

“Ohgodyeah,” he booms, all one word, when he agrees with something. He is doggedly loyal to the school and its students or, as he, too, calls them, “my kids.” There aren’t enough hours in the day for Fuller to do everything he wants to do for Blue Devils teams.

Fuller is a pivotal character in the book, someone who constantly looms in the background to make sure everything is going exactly as it should. When he became AD, he worked hard with the school’s new principal, Gus Le Blanc, to create a better eligibility policy for athletes, one that dramatically improved graduation rates and strengthened teams.

A football guy, embracing soccer was something that took him a while, something he had to learn. But the one thing that took him no time at all to figure out? How to accommodate the newcomers to Lewiston’s sports teams, especially soccer. In this largely Catholic city with its long history of French-Canadian immigrants, Fuller never blinked at the soccer team’s roster, which was composed almost entirely of African refugees who practiced Islam. “These are our athletes,” he says much later in the book. “Accommodate them.”

It is no surprise that he was named Maine’s Athletic Director of the Year in 2017.

Visit Amy Bass's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Frost's "Producer of Controversy"

Jennifer Frost is an Associate Professor in history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her books include Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism.

Frost applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War, and reported the following:

My book examines the career, politics, and films of independent Hollywood filmmaker Stanley Kramer in the context of the Cold War. As a producer-director, Kramer became best known for making social problem films—films that took as their subject a problem or conflict in society—and for his liberal politics. He made films about contemporary topics such as American race relations, as with The Defiant Ones (1958) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). His films’ liberal themes of racial and ethnic tolerance, freedom of thought and expression meant they were categorized as “message movies.” Throughout his career, the political messages of his films provoked much controversy but also made them relevant to the most significant issues and debates of his day.

This fact is nowhere more true than with the Kramer movie discussed on page 99: On the Beach (1959). This film addressed the catastrophic global consequences of nuclear war. An adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel, the movie stars Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck. It tells the story of a group of Australians, an American nuclear submarine commander, and his crew awaiting certain death from radioactive fallout following the outbreak of nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. “This is by far the most important story that I have ever found,” Kramer declared, after purchasing the rights to Shute’s novel. “It is an enormous challenge,” he added, because “it was a story that must reach everybody, so that its message could penetrate every corner of the earth.”

Page 99 picks up the story of how Kramer and his team took On the Beach from page to screen and began to work with United Artists to promote the film. Their promotional campaign confronted a paradoxical challenge: how to transform a grim and depressing story into popular entertainment that would attract a global audience? They set about

…designing a promotion campaign with an “emphasis on the world-shaking theme over all other box office factors,” where “the bigness and eminence of the story” took precedence over “a stellar cast.” United Artists ballyhooed their campaign as unprecedented in Hollywood history given its worldwide reach. They also could not resist a bomb-related metaphor. “United Artists officially opens the missile age in motion picture publicity…dispersing a message of unmistakably inter-continental significance.” Every element of the campaign, every “paratext,” was international in orientation: the newspaper display ads, posters, trailers, special screenings, and, especially, the premiere.

Held on December 17, 1959, the global premiere of On the Beach “addressed all mankind.” “Never Before in the History of the Industry Has the World Been Linked Together by One Motion Picture” blared the publicity. Host cities included Berlin, Caracas, Chicago, Johannesburg, Lima, London, Melbourne, Moscow, New York, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Zurich, and even the U.S. naval station in Antarctica premiered the film to ensure coverage of all seven continents. Prominent political figures and dignitaries attended premieres, including mayors in Berlin and Johannesburg and members of royal families in Stockholm and Tokyo.

On the Beach’s international premiere prompted a discussion by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Cabinet, where officials raised concerns about the film’s “strong emotional appeal for banning nuclear weapons.” The message Stanley Kramer sent still remains relevant.

Learn more about Producer of Controversy at the publisher's website.

My Book, The Movie: Producer of Controversy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cynthia Miller-Idriss's "The Extreme Gone Mainstream"

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is associate professor of education and sociology and director of the International Training and Education Program at American University. Her books include Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is representative of important claims I make about why extremism appeals to youth. It falls near the end of a chapter in which I discuss the role of fantastical and mythical narratives in the recruitment and radicalization of far right youth. Earlier in the chapter I trace the ways in which what I call ‘myths of sacred origin’ work—through a combination of a designated golden age with consecrated, hallowed territory, a restoration narrative in which individuals are revered and redeemed through mortal sacrifice for the good of the collective, a reliance on ethnic purity and blood-based origins, and some sort of magical thinking involving gods, heroes, and legends. In Germany, I show, the far right’s sacred origin narrative blended two sets of mythical sagas—the myth of Aryan racial ‘stock’ and the myth of Nordic descent—which together has held powerful sway for the extreme right since well before the Nazi era. I then analyze the way in which these Nordic origin myths and fantasies show up in commercialized clothing marketed to the far right, and what young people had to say about the iconography and messages in that clothing. Page 99 marks the part of the chapter where I begin an elaboration of why sacred origin narratives might appeal to disenfranchised youth during a period of postmodern uncertainty.

Nordic myths and fantasies, as I explain in this chapter, do several things for far right youth. For example, they evoke whiteness and Aryan-ness without using illegal or taboo symbols, and identify aspirational traits like heroism, strength, loyalty, integrity, devotion, and purity. But what page 99 introduces is the notion that sacred origin myths appeal to far right youth because of the ways in which they position Germans as poised to restore a golden era in which Germanic tribes were the apex of civilizations. In this sense, they enable utopian anticipation of an alternative future world. This kind of fantasy or magical thinking may be particularly appealing to individuals who are unable to cope in the uncertainty of the postmodern era, when increasing mobility, transformation in family structures, and a loss of predictable careers can make life seem far more isolated, uprooted and anxious. In the remainder of the book, I examine similar themes through an analysis of death symbols, global iconography, and expressions of masculinity in the clothing and brands.

Visit Cynthia Miller-Idriss's website.

--Marshal Zeringue